Ashes In the Wind by Christopher Bland Page A

health of the Irish Free State at a formal dinner once a week. Unease is added to the unreality Tomas has felt ever since leaving Drimnamore for Staigue Fort.
    ‘You’re doing great,’ says Donal. ‘O’Connor’s a good man, and he doesn’t want your job. The men like you well enough, they do what you tell them, and they all know what you’ve done during the war.’
    ‘How do they know that?’
    ‘I told them.’
    After a month at Ballincollig, Tomas’s platoon wins the battalion hurling competition. Tomas feels this is a good moment to ask for a week’s leave and uses the time to go back to County Kerry.
    Returning to Drimnamore is an ordeal, made no easier by his mother’s joy at seeing him. Annie Sullivan cries, hugs him, cries again.
    ‘It’s thanks to the Blessed Virgin Mary you’re back,’ she says, crossing herself. ‘We thought you dead until Father Michael read that you had escaped. The Tans came looking for you here several times, but I told them I knew nothing. As indeed I did.’
    ‘I couldn’t send a message. I’m sorry for the worry I caused you,’ and Tomas wraps his arms around Annie, who is sobbing and smiling.
    ‘You’ll stay here now surely,’ she says anxiously.
    ‘Ah no, I’m in the army now, and there’s still work to be done. But I’ll be back to help with the harvest later on, and you’d better set me to work.’
    Tomas spends three days doing the jobs that were too heavy for Annie, planting out the seed potatoes, repairing the fences and re-laying half a dozen slates that had been dislodged by the winter gales. He strips and repairs the water pump in the yard, oils and sharpens the scythes and the axe, and puts a new shaft on the slane. He goes out to the old turf line above the house, digs out the drain and takes the thick four-inch layer of fibrous grass off the top to expose the rich chocolate brown. He has always enjoyed the work; with a sharpened slane it is surprisingly easy once the top is clear and in two afternoons he cuts and stacks enough to see Annie through the rest of the year.
    In the evenings they sit and talk over the fire in the kitchen. Tomas gives his mother an exact account of the battle at Staigue Fort, but is much vaguer about his life on the run in Cork and in Dublin.
    Late one evening she says, ‘John Burke came looking for his mother and asked me if I knew where she might be, and where you were. I said I didn’t know, that you wouldn’t harm a hair on her head.’
    On Saturday Tomas walks out to Staigue Fort, the sun gleaming on the Kenmare River, the hedges red with fuchsia in full bloom. He stands on top of the fort wall, looking up at the pass where the Manchester Regiment had first appeared, then goes to the souterrain and crawls along it until it surfaces in the little wood. He looks at the site of the Lewis gun where he and Frank had killed three men. There are still empty cartridge cases lying half hidden in the grass. He picks one up and puts it in his pocket, plucks a fuchsia flower from the hedge and slips it between the pages of his missal, the bright red of the petals the colour of the blood around Seamus O’Connell’s head. He walks back down to the fort, which looks impregnable.
    ‘They’d never have driven us out if we’d had a machine gun and a few more men,’ he says out loud.
    He ducks inside the low entrance and stops where Seamus O’Connell and Patrick O’Mahony had both lain on the grass, one dead, the other with a shattered knee. He tries to remember the Prayer for the Dead.
    ‘Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon them.’ He has forgotten the final line, and ends, ‘Rest in peace, Seamus, Patrick, Michael...’
    He walks back into Drimnamore, where a much-reduced Fair Day is in progress on the green. Father Michael is there.
    ‘Welcome back,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you in church tomorrow. There’ll be plenty there glad to see you back.’
    ‘Thank you, Father,’ says